colours, in such floppy trousers, such silly boots. He was a comical fellow, wasn't he? 
He made himself laugh, he was so comical.
  The wind began to get into him, whipping him up into a frenzy as it scooted through his 
hair and made his eye-balls as cold as two lumps of ice in his sockets.
  He began to run, skip, dance, cavort through the streets, white under the lights, dark 
in between. Now you see me, now you don't. Now you see me, now you -Quaid hadn't been 
woken by the dream this time. This
  time he had heard a noise. Definitely a noise.
  The moon had risen high enough to throw its beams through the window, through the door 
and on to the top of the stairs. There was no need to put on the light. All he needed to 
see, he could see. The top of the stairs were empty, as ever.
  Then the bottom stair creaked, a tiny noise as though a breath had landed on it.
  Quaid knew dread then.
  Another creak, as it came up the stairs towards him, the ridiculous dream. It had to be 
a dream. After all, he knew no clowns, no axe-killers. So how could that absurd image, 
the same image that woke him night after night, be anything but a dream?
  
  Yet, perhaps there were some dreams so preposterous they could only be true.
  No clowns, he said to himself, as he stood watching the door, and the stairway, and the 
spotlight of the moon. Quaid knew only fragile minds, so weak they couldn't give him a 
clue to the nature, to the origin, or to the cure for the panic that now held him in 
thrall. All they did was break, crumble into dust, when faced with the slightest sign of 
the dread at the heart of life.
  He knew no clowns, never had, never would.
  Then it appeared; the face of a fool. Pale to whiteness in the light of the moon, its 
young features bruised, unshaven and puffy, its smile open like a child's smile. It had 
bitten its lip in its excitement. Blood was smeared across its lower jaw, and its gums 
were almost black with blood. Still it was a clown. Indisputably a clown even to its 
ill-fitting clothes, so incongruous, so pathetic.
  Only the axe didn't quite match the smile.
  It caught the moonlight as the maniac made small, chopping motions with it, his tiny 
black eyes glinting with anticipation of the fun ahead.
  Almost at the top of the stairs, he stopped, his smile not faltering for a moment as he 
gazed at Quaid's terror.
  Quaid's legs gave out, and he stumbled to his knees.
  The clown climbed another stair, skipping as he did so, his glittering eyes fixed on 
Quaid, filled with a sort of benign malice. The axe rocked back and forth in his white 
hands, in a petite version of the killing stroke.
  Quaid knew him.
  It was his pupil: his guinea-pig, transformed into the image of his own dread.
  Him. Of all men. Him. The deaf boy.
  
  The skipping was bigger now, and the clown was making a deep-throated noise, like the 
call of some fantastical bird. The axe was describing wider and wider sweeps in the air, 
each more lethal than the last.
  'Stephen,' said Quaid.
  The name meant nothing to Steve. All he saw was the mouth opening. The mouth closing. 
Perhaps a sound came out: perhaps not. It was irrelevant to him.
  The throat of the clown gave out a screech, and the axe swung up over his head, 
two-handed. At the same moment the merry little dance became a run, as the axe man leapt 
the last two stairs and ran into the bedroom, full into the spotlight.
  Quaid's body half turned to avoid the killing blow, but not quickly or elegantly 
enough. The blade slit the air and sliced through the back of Quaid's arm, sheering off 
most of his triceps, shattering his humerus and opening the flesh of his lower arm in a 
gash that just missed his artery.
  Quaid's scream could have been heard ten houses away, except that those houses were 
rubble. There was nobody to hear. Nobody to come and drag the clown off him.
  The axe, eager to be about its business, was hacking at Quaid's thigh now, as though it 
was chopping a log. Yawning wounds four or five inches deep exposed the shiny steak of 
the philosopher's muscle, the bone, the marrow. With each stroke the clown would tug at 
the axe to pull it out, and Quaid's body would jerk like a puppet.
  Quaid screamed. Quaid begged. Quaid cajoled.
  The clown didn't hear a word.
  All he heard was the noise in his head: the whistles, the whoops, the howls, the hums. 
He had taken refuge where no rational argument, nor threat, would ever fetch him out 
again. Where the thump of his heart was law, and the whine of his blood was music.
  How he danced, this deaf-boy, danced like a loon to see his tormentor gaping like a 
fish, the depravity of his intellect silenced forever. How the blood spurted! How it 
gushed and fountained!
  The little clown laughed to see such fun. There was a night's entertainment to be had 
here, he thought. The axe was his friend forever, keen and wise. It could cut, and 
cross-cut, it could slice and amputate, yet still they could keep this man alive, if they 
were cunning enough, alive for a long, long while.
  Steve was happy as a lamb. They had the rest of the night ahead of them, and all the 
music he could possibly want was sounding in his head.
  And Quaid knew, meeting the clown's vacant stare through an air turned bloody, that 
there was worse in the world than dread. Worse than death itself.
  There was pain without hope of healing. There was life that refused to end, long after 
the mind had begged the body to cease. And worst, there were dreams come true.
  
  HELL'S EVENT
  
  HELL CAME UP to the streets and squares of London that September, icy from the depths 
of the Ninth Circle, too frozen to be warmed even by the swelter of an Indian summer. It 
had laid its plans as carefully as ever, plans being what they were, and fragile. This 
time it was perhaps a little more finicky than usual, checking every last detail twice or 
three times, to be certain it had every chance of winning this vital game.
  It had never lacked competitive spirit; it had matched life against flesh a thousand 
thousand times down the centuries, sometimes winning, more often losing. Wagers were, 
after all, the stuff of its advancement. Without the human urge to compete, to bargain, 
and to bet, Pandemonium might well have fallen for want of citizens. Dancing, dog racing, 
fiddle-playing: it was all one to the gulfs; all a game in which it might, if it played 
with sufficient wit, garner a soul or two. That was why Hell came up to London that 
bright blue day  to run a race, and to win, if it could, enough souls to keep it busy 
with perdition another age.
  
  Cameron tuned his radio; the voice of the commentator flared and faded as though he was 
speaking from the Pole instead of St Paul's Cathedral. It was still a good half-hour 
before the race began, but Cameron wanted to listen to the warm-up commentary, just to 
hear what they were saying about his boy.